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We now pretending harddrives don't have a tendency to shit the bed without warning? Like, that's not a thing that happens anymore? And you're going to, with a s

We now pretending harddrives don't have a tendency to shit the bed without warning? Like, that's not a thing that happens anymore? And you're going to, with a straight face, advance the claim that digital platforms and media in play today will still be viable in their current form in 30 years? Because I've got optical media in the house that's almost that old that's still perfectly viable.

account42 4y ago
> We now pretending harddrives don't have a tendency to shit the bed without warning? Like, that's not a thing that happens anymore? Most of my HDD failures hav been preceeded by either errors logged via SMART or outright bad blocks. Generally, immediate full on failures are good because you can just switch over to backups whereas with more gradual failures there is a chance of corrupted data making it into your backups. Less of a concern for write-once data like movie rips though. > And you're going to, with a straight face, advance the claim that digital platforms and media in play today will still be viable in their current form in 30 years? Platforms will go away, sure, but formats will be supported for a long time by ffmpeg and players using ffmpeg. Probably longer than any player for your physical discs. > Because I've got optical media in the house that's almost that old that's still perfectly viable. And other people had optical media fail in much less time. There are always outliers. Anyway, pretty sure GP is talking about storing rips of optical media (otherwise keeping the discs as backup would make less sense) so you can get the best of both worlds - convenient digital files with the optical media as a disaster recovery in case your files rot first. That's my current stategy anyway.
Dylan16807 4y ago
> We now pretending harddrives don't have a tendency to shit the bed without warning? No, that's why I talked about backups and copies. > And you're going to, with a straight face, advance the claim that digital platforms and media in play today will still be viable in their current form in 30 years? Because I've got optical media in the house that's almost that old that's still perfectly viable. Those optical media are a digital platform. And I do claim it will be easier to get software in 30 years that can play back an mpeg file than it will be to get hardware that reads an optical disc and... plays back the mpeg data written on the disc. MPEG-1 turns 30 this year and every media player handles it fine. MPEG-2, which DVDs use, is over 25 and every media player handles it fine. They'll still handle it in 30 more years, I'm certain. Along with the codecs Blu-ray uses. As for the hard drive itself, USB and NTFS should last but I wasn't suggesting using the same model the entire time. I said to migrate to a new drive every handful of years.
- forgetfreeman 4y ago
  All of which reinforces my original argument for physical media, namely multi-decade hands off viability, something digital absolutely cannot provide.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    No, not "all of which". That benefit is one part of the story. I assume you want to use the discs, right? The effort to swap between discs to watch a different one is not very far from the effort to copy your entire digital library. And you have to do the former every viewing, while you have to do the latter once every five years. And it takes up hundreds of times less physical space. Also your original argument was two parts. One, that's it's sisyphean. That's somewhat true except the amount of effort is trivial and the original discs will also start to rot if you wait decades. The second original argument made was about formats being deprecated, and that one is flat out wrong. The discs will deprecate before the files will. And the part about shelves not being a problem isn't true for everyone and often isn't true for big collections.
    - forgetfreeman 4y ago
      You are ridiculous. Taking a dvd out of a case is absolutely not on the same order as acquiring and maintaining (ongoing as purchases are made) a digital backup strategy. And there's an entire graveyard of file formats from the 90s you'd have to write software from scratch to decode these days so let's dispense with the notion that digital media formats are a settled matter.

account42 4y ago

> We now pretending harddrives don't have a tendency to shit the bed without warning? Like, that's not a thing that happens anymore? Most of my HDD failures hav been preceeded by either errors logged via SMART or outright bad blocks. Generally, immediate full on failures are good because you can just switch over to backups whereas with more gradual failures there is a chance of corrupted data making it into your backups. Less of a concern for write-once data like movie rips though. > And you're going to, with a straight face, advance the claim that digital platforms and media in play today will still be viable in their current form in 30 years? Platforms will go away, sure, but formats will be supported for a long time by ffmpeg and players using ffmpeg. Probably longer than any player for your physical discs. > Because I've got optical media in the house that's almost that old that's still perfectly viable. And other people had optical media fail in much less time. There are always outliers. Anyway, pretty sure GP is talking about storing rips of optical media (otherwise keeping the discs as backup would make less sense) so you can get the best of both worlds - convenient digital files with the optical media as a disaster recovery in case your files rot first. That's my current stategy anyway.

Dylan16807 4y ago

> We now pretending harddrives don't have a tendency to shit the bed without warning? No, that's why I talked about backups and copies. > And you're going to, with a straight face, advance the claim that digital platforms and media in play today will still be viable in their current form in 30 years? Because I've got optical media in the house that's almost that old that's still perfectly viable. Those optical media are a digital platform. And I do claim it will be easier to get software in 30 years that can play back an mpeg file than it will be to get hardware that reads an optical disc and... plays back the mpeg data written on the disc. MPEG-1 turns 30 this year and every media player handles it fine. MPEG-2, which DVDs use, is over 25 and every media player handles it fine. They'll still handle it in 30 more years, I'm certain. Along with the codecs Blu-ray uses. As for the hard drive itself, USB and NTFS should last but I wasn't suggesting using the same model the entire time. I said to migrate to a new drive every handful of years.

forgetfreeman 4y ago
All of which reinforces my original argument for physical media, namely multi-decade hands off viability, something digital absolutely cannot provide.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  No, not "all of which". That benefit is one part of the story. I assume you want to use the discs, right? The effort to swap between discs to watch a different one is not very far from the effort to copy your entire digital library. And you have to do the former every viewing, while you have to do the latter once every five years. And it takes up hundreds of times less physical space. Also your original argument was two parts. One, that's it's sisyphean. That's somewhat true except the amount of effort is trivial and the original discs will also start to rot if you wait decades. The second original argument made was about formats being deprecated, and that one is flat out wrong. The discs will deprecate before the files will. And the part about shelves not being a problem isn't true for everyone and often isn't true for big collections.
  - forgetfreeman 4y ago
    You are ridiculous. Taking a dvd out of a case is absolutely not on the same order as acquiring and maintaining (ongoing as purchases are made) a digital backup strategy. And there's an entire graveyard of file formats from the 90s you'd have to write software from scratch to decode these days so let's dispense with the notion that digital media formats are a settled matter.